Maintaining healthy habits like eating a balanced diet and exercising regularly can help reduce the risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and depression.
Health appears to be a complex phenomenon with many factors beyond the control of individuals. Nevertheless, a lay perspective on health often emphasizes wholeness and pragmatism.
Preventive Healthcare
The goal of preventive healthcare is to keep individuals healthy through education, disease screenings, and wellness visits. This type of care is a great complement to traditional medical care and can help improve overall health outcomes, reduce cost, and save lives.
Preventive care can be as simple as regular health screenings, annual checkups, and getting immunizations. It can also be as complex as a full-body assessment and lifestyle modifications to address modifiable risk factors like physical inactivity, smoking, poor nutrition, stress levels, and family history of chronic diseases.
Preventive care helps identify and treat diseases in their early stages when they are more manageable. It can also provide a better quality of life for patients and reduce strain on health systems by reducing the need for hospitalizations, medications, and other costly treatments. It can even lead to a longer lifespan as many diseases can be prevented from developing or stopped in their tracks with primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention.
Physical Health
Physical health is a part of overall well-being that refers to the normal functioning of the body. It involves things like fitness level, the quality of sleep and rest and avoiding unhealthful habits such as smoking.
Prioritizing your physical health can help you feel more energy and decrease your risk for heart disease, diabetes and other health conditions. Exercise also produces your brain’s feel-good neurotransmitters, which boost self-esteem and ward off feelings of depression and anxiety.
ACT places an emphasis on developing psychological flexibility, which can help individuals cope with challenges and stress. It also helps them to clarify personal values and choose actions that align with those values. For example, for someone experiencing a chronic medical condition, ACT can teach them techniques to enhance their psychological wellbeing and develop resilience to the effects of illness. This may include cognitive restructuring, emotion regulation and self-compassion practices.
Mental Health
Mental health refers to emotional well-being and the ability to cope with life’s stresses and challenges. It enables people to realize their potential, learn and work well, build healthy relationships, and contribute to society.
Many factors can improve or impair mental health. These include personal strengths like coping skills, support networks and positive emotions, as well as environmental factors such as housing quality, access to safe drinking water, economic opportunities, and the environment.
Symptoms of a mental health condition can be treated with talk therapy, lifestyle changes and medicines. Getting enough sleep also is important for maintaining good mental health. Local resources can help people find a therapist. National organizations, such as APA Services, have websites with tools to help people locate providers in their area. Some health insurance companies also provide a database of providers who are covered by the plan. People with mental health conditions should be able to get the care they need to manage their symptoms and live their lives to their fullest potential.
Social Health
Social health has become a broader, more holistic term that includes social ties and support systems as well as mental and emotional wellbeing. However, the field is still maturing, and researchers need to develop a unifying framework that allows them to speak fluently across disciplines.
Research has demonstrated a clear link between social health and a wide range of health outcomes, including morbidity, mortality, and quality of life. Anthropology, sociology, political science, and gerontology have made important contributions to this reframing of the public health agenda, but more work remains to be done in order to develop and test a broad set of multidisciplinary approaches to social health.
Incorporating healthy social connections into your work environment is a great way to keep employees feeling connected and happy. This can include setting up board games in the break room, meditation Mondays, or getting people from different departments to mingle and get to know each other. A healthy social life can help alleviate stress, depression, and anxiety and boost serotonin and dopamine levels.